As a small business, it is recommended that your advertising budget be 5% of your gross sales. The challenge for most small businesses is using these limited resources successfully. Small businesses can realize a return on their advertising investment by following a few simple rules. Here are the keys to successfully advertise your small business.
Generate Interest
When planning your ad campaign, always keep in mind that you must generate interest in those who see your ad in order to have a chance at gaining their patronage. The best way to grab interest is to advertise the benefit(s) that you will provide rather than the product or the service itself. This can be as simple as a print poster with an image of a beautiful beach landscape with the caption “Can you picture yourself here?”
One on One
A second key to successful advertising is to narrow the message of your ad to speak to one targeted market. Your products and services may be useful for many different markets. Select the two or three markets with the largest volume and tailor an advertising message for each of them. Have each message incorporated into a print poster design and display them according to where your target markets travel.
Brand Yourself
Always be sure to include your company name, logo, and contact info on your advertising material and any material that customers may come into contact with, such as shipping boxes or shopping bags. Passersby should know your business name within seconds of seeing your print poster or picking up your brochure.
Evaluate Effectiveness
Evaluating the effectiveness of an ad campaign may be as simple as taking note of increased sales and foot traffic. But to know how to better direct your marketing budget in the future, you need to find out what brought customers to you. A simple way to do this is just to ask: how did you hear about us? what brought you in today? This will help identify what marketing venues had the greatest effect.
Be Credible
The natural response to advertisements is distrust. You will have to counteract the distrust by being honest in your advertising. It may take some added creativity to come up with ways to promote your product as what consumers need without causing that instant “it can’t be true” reaction. Sell the true benefits that you can provide consumers and back them up with your customer service.
Simple and to the Point
The final key to successfully advertising your small business is to keep the message simple. Find the one simple and compelling tagline that best fits your product or service and use it for print posters, business cards, brochures, shopping bags, shipping boxes, etc. It needs to be true and it needs to communicate your mission in a simple, to the point phrase. Think Ivory soap, “Ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure”, I can hear it now and you probably can too. Simple and to the point.
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